Page 156 of Lyric & the Heartbeats

“No more pot brownies for you,” Emerson teased as he brushed a thumb across her cheek. “You’re totally useless.”

Lyric huffed and shifted her gaze to his, tilting her head to capture his thumb between her teeth and bite threateningly. It hurt about as much as a kitten’s playful bite, but he tried not to laugh.

“Take it back,” she mumbled through her bite.

“Nope,” he refused, popping the ‘p’ and giving up the battle against his smile. “So this is what happens when we let another alpha steal you for a day? You come home stoned and too sleepy to even play video games.”

“We cooked a lot,” she said, brushing her lips over his thumb and closing her eyes again. “Cooking’s hard work, you know. We should give Javi a raise. He does it every day.”

Henry snorted, and Lyric picked her head up off Emerson’s lap to glare at the other alpha. “What are you laughing at?”

“You’re an adorable omega.”

Emerson sensed the tension in Lyric’s body, and he stiffened in response. Even his breath paused, captive in his chest as he awaited her rebuttal. He could practically feel her hackles rising and studied her for any sense of movement. It was like time froze for a moment in the bus, even Adra’s pencil stopped scraping across the paper.

But Lyric just shuffled back down into her comfy position, grabbed Emerson’s hand, threaded it back through her hair, and hummed as she closed her eyes. “That’s me. Cute as fuck.”

Something bubbled in his chest, like the water running off into a brook at the end of a stream. It filled and filled until he was sure it would overflow, but it never did.

Happiness? A sense of pride, maybe?

Yes. He was an alpha proud of his omega. Lyric hadn’t lashed out in response to being called an omega.

Was this Henry’s way of testing her? A sly attempt at conditioning her to accept herself for who she was?

Emerson stared down at the beauty in his lap. Continued stroking through her long, reddish blond hair, traced the shape of her lips and the feathering of her lashes across the top of her cheeks.

Was he not giving her enough credit?

Lyric was strong, and that strength went much deeper than just the walls she’d built around herself.

It was something he was discovering the more she let them in. Brick by brick, they were revealing more of her, learning more about her, and he suspected Lyric was learning more about herself too.

He wished he could know what had gone through her mind just now. What thoughts had she followed that led to her lying back down and brushing off his words—or better, accepting them as truth without more than a little hesitation and moving on?

“Cute is one word I’d use to describe you, sure,” he murmured softly.

“What’s that?” she asked, cracking one eye open to peer up at him.

He shook his head. “Never mind.”

Once Lyric had closed her eyes again, Emerson watched Adra sketch for a while, their gazes meeting, Adra’s knowing smile only growing.

He’d never really thought about it before, and maybe it was naive of him, but he’d never considered what would happen if Adra found a pack first. It was always understood that they were just placeholders in each other’s lives to stave off going feral.

Gently raking the long strands of Lyric’s hair across his thigh, he smiled.

Well, now he didn’t have to worry about it at all, because they’d found their pack together.

He leaned his head back against the bus seat, flashes of streetlamps strobing across his vision before he let his eyes drift closed.

He didn’t wake again until something scratched against his cheek.

Fluttering his eyes open, he found Lyric standing before him, one finger softly scratching at the bristles of his short beard.

“Bed?” she mouthed.

Half asleep, Emerson nodded and let her pull him to his feet. He barely avoided knocking into the wall and cursed quietly, the bus dark in the middle of the night.